Arnold Bax was the elder son of a well-off non-conformist family from
south London, whose early signs of musical talent were encouraged by a
sympathetic and over-protective mother. (Similarly encouraged, Bax's brother Clifford
became a well-known writer and playwright.) Bax was born in Streatham, and as
he remarked "I cherish a fancy – or delusion – that Streatham in the
'eighties was still Surrey… hazily I do recall a certain mellowness and
port-windiness about some of the older streets". Yet his most
impressionable years, in his teens, were spent in Hampstead, where his family
moved in 1896, his father buying an imposing mansion, Ivybank, set in three and
a half acres. To all intents and purposes it was a country house existence,
Hampstead still being semi-rural.

Bax was a student at the Royal Academy of Music from 1900 to 1905 and
then, having a private income, he was free to develop his musical career as the
whim took him. He was eager to throw off constraining parental influence, and
adopted a semi-bohemian lifestyle, travelling widely, including to the German
city of Dresden and Russia. His favourite destination was the west coast of
Ireland, where, as he put it, 'lorded by the Atlantic' and under the influence
of the early poetry of Yeats, he discovered the village of Glencolumcille in
Donegal, a place to which, until the First World War, he constantly returned.

Bax imbibed all things Irish, wrote poetry, short stories and Synge-like
plays, using the pseudonym of 'Dermot O'Byrne', and learned Irish Gaelic. When
in Dublin he moved in literary and nationalist circles, and his friends
included the poet and writer Padraic Colum, founder of the Irish Review, and
Padraig Pearse, champion of the Irish language who was executed after the
Easter Rising in 1916. It was the Easter Rising which was the divide in Bax's
life; the shocking unexpected event that brought him face to face with a
harsher reality. There is no doubt that the Elegiac Trio written
immediately after Easter 1916 celebrated a world that was lost, but in a sense
the later works with harp – the harp being, perhaps, a symbol of Ireland – had
this function too.

The earliest work in the present programme is the Elegiac Trio, which
Bax wrote for the same combination as Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola
and Harp, and at about the same time. The first performance was at
London's Aeolian Hall on 26th March 1917, when the performers were the
celebrated flautist Albert Fransella, the composer Waldo Warner on viola, and the
harpist Miriam Timothy. The Debussy sonata was actually written six months
before Bax's score, but it is difficult to see how Bax could have been
influenced by it, despite textural similarities, for the Debussy was first
heard six months after Bax completed his score and was not given a public
performance in London until six weeks before the first performance of Bax's
trio, when the performers were the same artists.

For a memorial piece written so soon after the event, Bax does not
indulge in histrionics; he does not stamp and rage; and while the music is
imbued with Bax's stunned reaction to the news from Ireland, he gives us no
clue to its non-musical imagery, not even a dedication. His first audiences
presumably related it to the war in France, certainly Bax made no mention of
Ireland. Yet, here Bax dreams of the distant past and presents a bardic song to
'Cathleen ní Hoolihan'.

Bax made his reputation as the composer of elaborate impressionistic
orchestral scores, including seven highly individual symphonies, orchestral
tone poems, concertos, choral music, but also much chamber music, piano music
and songs. After the First World War Bax emerged as a major figure as these
scores began to be heard in quick succession. Several were informed by Bax's ongoing
reaction to events in Ireland (and, indeed, a poetry pamphlet, A Dublin
Ballad and other poems, printed under Bax's pseudonym, had been banned by
the censor in Ireland in 1918).

After the Elegiac Trio, Bax had written an In Memoriam, this time scoring it for cor anglais, harp and string quartet, and he
followed it with the Harp Quintet which was written in 1919, probably at
much the same time that he made his first visit to Ireland after the War. Again
in a single movement, the sound of the harp is important in creating the
music's character and impact. Here again the overall mood is sorrowful.
However, the boldly, even dramatically, lyrical opening by the string quartet
(the harp only accompanying and adding occasional touches of colour) sets the
mood, but with the arrival of the sustained second subject the harp is now
boldly accompanying. Bax seems to be telling au unwritten story, with spectral
interludes and a dramatic faster episode with dissonant string accompaniment.
Inevitably none of them last; the harpist muses again and again on some private
grief. Towards the end Bax writes sonorously for the strings, the bold harp
accompaniment suggesting some bardic recounting of legends of long ago.
Eventually the music fades in a long-drawn twilight evocation. Here Bax's first
harpist was Gwendolen Mason, a well-known British player of the period.

Eight years passed
before Bax wrote the next work on the current programme. In the mid-1920s a new
musical influence entered Bax's life, when another harpist, Maria Korchinska,
became active on the London concert platform, encouraging him to write more
virtuosically for the instrument. The first musical outcome of this was Bax's
four movement Fantasy Sonata, which is dated April 1927 and was first
performed at a concert of his chamber music at the Grotrian Hall on 10th June
that year. Bax takes the harp and viola and treats them as the perfect romantic
medium, writing for the two with great resource, always alert for an original
instrumental timbre. Although the music plays continuously (with a brief break
between the third and fourth movements) this is, unusually for Bax, in four
movements. First comes an energetic Allegro molto, and the listener
should particularly note the opening viola theme; other ideas develop from it
and it signals the progress from movement to movement, and reappears at the
end. Towards the end of the first movement a cadenza leads into the dancing Allegro
moderato. If this is a scherzo it is a thistledown impression, soon leading
into tender, light and poetical passages. The slow movement follows, an elegiac
Lento espressivo, a rhapsodic and passionate song for the viola. In the
final Allegro the main theme returns and the work ends brilliantly.

Soon afterwards Bax was commissioned to produce a sonata (at first
called 'Sonatina') for flute and harp for Korchinska to play with her husband,
Count Benckendorff – the son of the last Czarist ambassador to London – in
April 1928, but it did not achieve a wider audience as it remained the property
of the Benckendorffs and was not published. As a result the music was little
known, and when Bax later re-scored the music as his Concerto for Seven
Instruments – in fact a septet – no-one noticed that it was an arrangement.
The music is in Bax's more customary three movements. Both themes of the first
movement, an Allegro moderato, have a folk-like feel to them, the second
appearing to borrow a phrase from the folk-tune 'Down by the Sally Gardens',
but the overall effect is high-spirited and outgoing. The second movement, Cavatina,
is marked Lento, and is in marked contrast, surely Bax thinking back
to the events of a dozen years before. Here the chromatic flute line and
wistful overall mood have a strongly elegiac tinge. Bax pulls himself together
in the concluding Moderato giocoso, where we find one of those dancing
movements which occur in many of his works, and which are surely derived from
his own memories of Irish folk-dances with his friends in the west. The
contrasted second subject tune is introduced by the harp, but before he can
become too introspective again, the mood lightens and the work ends
exuberantly.